LGA 2011 benefits worth it for gaming?

[freezingmo0on]

Hello everyone. I have been planning on building a computer primarily for gaming for quite a while now, mainly in waiting for the 7970/ Sandy Bridge E launch. Case and peripherals excluded, I have around 2200 to spend on this machine. I see that the 3820 is partially locked, so could that lead to bottlenecking with a 7970 crossfire setup? Or in the grand scheme of things, would the benefits of LGA 2011 (quad channel ram, pcie 3.0) be negligible for serious gaming and it be wiser to go with a 2600k build? I have researched this to the best of my ability and find the conclusions either mixed or inconclusive.

Thanks!

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Right now almost no games can take advantage of more than 4 cores. Now since one of the major selling points for the Intel® Core™ i7-2600K, i7-2700K i7-3930K and i7-3960X Extreme Edition happens to be the extra cores and hyper-threading which will have minimal value in gaming. Most of the people who understand the enthusiast space believe that the best gaming CPU right now is the Intel Core i5-2500K. In otherwords the differences between the Intel Core i5-2500K and the Intel Core i7s in a gaming environment make almost no difference in real performance.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[esrever]

The i5 2500k will do just as well as any of the extreme cpus in gaming.

pci 3.0 isn't useful in gaming as of yet and even multi gpu setups will not be bottlenecked with the i5.

 

[freezingmo0on]

Thank you for the helpful responses. The route I was planning on taking is waiting for the i7-3820 release on Feb. 13th, which seems to have similar performance when compared to other CPUs for gaming despite not being fully unlocked. This way I would be able to upgrade to Ivy Bridge E when the time came but still have a very powerful computer in the meantime. Would this be an unwise decision when I could just get a 2500k?

 

[esrever]

yes as the 2500k is a lot cheaper and will perform just as well in gaming.

only places where the i7 extreme are even good is encoding and rendering.

 

[nagol567]

These are all the parts i would recommend:
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3 LGA 1155 ~ $155
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge ~ $230
GPU: 2X SAPPHIRE 21197-00-40G Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 ~ $1120
PSU: COOLER MASTER Silent Pro RSA00-AMBAJ3-US 1000W ~ $160
RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 ~ $40
CPU cooling: Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme ~ $65
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III ~ $190
HDD: Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache ~ $170
Case: COOLER MASTER Storm Sniper ~ $130

Total: ~ $2260

 

[esrever]

These are all the parts i would recommend:
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3 LGA 1155 ~ $155
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge ~ $230
GPU: 2X SAPPHIRE 21197-00-40G Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 ~ $1120
PSU: COOLER MASTER Silent Pro RSA00-AMBAJ3-US 1000W ~ $160
RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 ~ $40
CPU cooling: Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme ~ $65
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III ~ $190
HDD: Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache ~ $170
Case: COOLER MASTER Storm Sniper ~ $130

Total: ~ $2260

I'd get this one instead of the reference:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125413

I think its worth the extra bit of money.

 

[HEXiT]

unless your gonna throw multiple high end gfx cards at it then the 2011 isnt worth the effort. the only real benefit over the i5 is the pci-e bandwidth. which will enable you to bypass sharing it as long as the motherboard supports multiple x16 pci-e slots.
if your just going for say 2 mid-high end gaming cards then the 2500k will serve you well and wont loose out by very much at all... maybe 1-2 percent. but for way way less money its certainly worth the loss.

 

[Duckhunt]

I think if you go for anything. Go for a single GPU or card with multi GPU. I would stay away from multi card setups. You might get microstutter that can be annoying.

Radeon cards use the least power at this point in time.